On the Tree (Why the Apple Was Never the Point)

Fucking Human · Soft Armor Philosophy :)

People get stuck on the wrong part of the story.

They obsess over the apple, the sin, the blame, the fall…

But what I think about most is the Tree.

Why it was there at all.

Why choice even existed.

If everything was good — all good —

why plant something that opened the door to anything else?

Why place knowledge in the center of perfection

if humans were never meant to seek it?

Because you can’t have love without choice.

You can’t have growth without awareness.

And you can’t become fully human without knowing the difference

between what helps you and what harms you.

The Tree wasn’t about disobedience.

It was about consciousness.

Before the fruit, Adam and Eve lived in innocence —

a kind of spiritual childhood. A Goodness.

The Tree was the moment humanity stepped into maturity —

the moment we moved from created to co-creator.

From “I don’t know” to “I understand.”

From unconscious good to chosen good.

And I still believe in how the story starts.

I still believe everything is fundamentally GOOD —

including people who don’t know goodness exists in them yet.

Maybe that’s naïve.

Maybe that’s my own nakedness, like Eve before the fall.

But it’s real.

And it hasn’t always protected me.

Seeing the good in everyone has cost me.

Believing in the light inside people who only show shadows

has broken my heart more than once.

But it won’t change me.

Because I wasn’t the one who ate the apple.

I didn’t lose my innocence —

I kept choosing goodness anyway.

And here’s the part that hit me recently:

if the Tree is about choice,

I have to stop trying to make choices for the people I love.

My instinct is to protect, redirect, fix.

To hold on.

To save them pain.

But growth doesn’t happen without freedom —

and freedom doesn’t exist without the possibility of getting it wrong.

If God could allow humanity choice in the middle of paradise,

I can allow my loved ones space to choose their own path too.

The Tree is the tension inside all of us —

Ego vs Higher Self.

Fear vs Faith.

Control vs Trust.

 

Every morning we stand at the Tree again and choose:

Do I cling? Or trust?

Do I repeat? Or evolve?

Do I protect out of fear, or love from truth?

The love I’m talking about isn’t romantic.

It’s bigger —

universal, eternal, the kind you feel toward dogs and birds

and strangers and the world itself.

I don’t believe that the tree was about shame.

It was about life.

Awakening.

The right to choose again and again.

And maybe that’s the real message:

Your personal Eden is inside you.

And the Tree is too.